How I Landed a No. 1 Album on iTunes Using Social Media | Fast Company September 2nd, 2010

I started my blog Pacing the Panic Room two years ago as a way to stay connected to friends and document both my foray into step-fatherhood and my efforts to grow a new baby with my wife in Orlando, Florida. A year ago, I had an idea to see if my readers would help support a spin-off project. On Monday, my little label-less record, DO FUN STUFF, benefitting a charity for a genetic disorder nobody had ever heard of, was sitting at No. 1 in the Children’s Music genre on iTunes. The iTunes.

I’ve run a live rock ‘n’ roll venue, promoted bands and their records, managed their tours, and even worked briefly at an indie music label. But what’s happened with this album has changed the way I think about branding, marketing, and above all online influence.

Finding An Audience

Right away I discovered a huge community of parent bloggers (and that I was but one voice among thousands of established others). Then popular blogger Joanna Goddard mentioned my weekly photo series documenting my wife’s pregnancy on A Cup of Jo. My pageloads spiked from 800 to about 20,000 in a single day. And even when the traffic subsided, I had a dedicated new readership who followed the pregnancy and stuck around long afterward to read about my family’s ups and downs.

In the middle of that weekly photo series, my wife and I learned that our boy (who we call LB on the blog) had a rare disorder called Smith Magenis Syndrome, which manifests itself with a laundry list of symptoms that range from mild and manageable to nightmarish. It was a hard thump on the head learning all of the struggles and delays LB had experienced wouldn’t go away with age; SMS does not go away. And yet, none of his Doctors knew anything about it, nor could they offer any real insight. So we turned to the Internet and found our answers in a community called Parents and Researchers Interested in Smith Magenis Syndrome (PRISMS).

via How I Landed a No. 1 Album on iTunes Using Social Media | Fast Company.

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YouTube – ICE Checkpoint at Netroots Nation 2010 August 3rd, 2010

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Meg Whitman’s governor campaign spending nears $100 million | McClatchy August 3rd, 2010

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman spent a record-shattering $99.7 million in campaign funds through June 30, according to campaign finance records filed Monday.

Whitman, who faced a June 8 primary election challenge from Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, has spent far more than Democratic rival Jerry Brown, who was unopposed for the Democratic nomination.

via Meg Whitman’s governor campaign spending nears $100 million | McClatchy.

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World Cup Confessional June 29th, 2010

I’ve been railing against the evils of soccer for many years. My friends can tell that I’m at least half joking, mocking more the McCarthyist than the world’s biggest sport. As it turns out I’m not the only one who perceives the communist menace in soccer. So even as the engines of American crass commercialism canablize soccer with the same blood lust that’s turned the NBA into an extended Nike  advertising vehicle, it still breaks my heart to see good American kids playing an unAmerican commie sport.  After all, we have best sports in the world right here in the good ol’ US&A. And don’t get me started on Soccer Moms as a conservative political coalition. I’m certain that in hell, Sarah Palin is parked outside a soccer game in her SUV.

However, as someone who has made a documentary film about the social impact of sports, I’d have to be more xenophobic than Avigdor Lieberman not to appreciate the cultural meaning of soccer. Important works such as Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization” examine the global meaning of soccer covering similar themes as Bend it Like Beckham, and my very own “First Basket”.

So it is within this global cultural commentator excuse that I can admit having gotten a little bit caught up in World Cup fever as team USA tied the mighty UK as well as the more footloose Slovenians, and staged a dramatic upset over the heavily favored Algerians. The draw against the heavily favored Brits filled me with a particularly deep feeling of patriotic sports vindication.  I lived in the UK for a year during grad school, and on more than one occasion, Brits randomly stopped me on the street and asked me if i was a Yank (American, not NY Yankee). Before giving me a chance to ask how they could tell, they would go on to explain  that soccer was a better sport than American football because in American football the clock stops between plays. This enraged me because American football is the greatest sport in the world. Never mind that by British logic then, marathon running and cricket are far superior to soccer.

Team USA ignited the wick of American soccer hope. As John Oliver and Jon Stewart duked it out on the daily show, US fans seemed to have more of a fighting chance with every new tournament.

So it is with this sense of national hope and competitive pride that my quadr-annual mild soccer interest ended with the inevitable heartbreak (albeit quite minor, compared to those dished out yearly by the Mets) of our loss to the far more capable Ghanaians.

But does our decent into soccer necessarily mark the abandonment of those sports and sports values that made us great as a nation?

Welcoming America to the Third World, John Oliver summed up our progress rather well, “For the most powerful country in the world, we’re in “pretty bad shape” but “for a third world country,” we’re “easily in the top five”. Our soccer standing is now in synch with our “abysmal math scores”.

So, as I ponder this as a rationale to further trash soccer, I have to come clean. Even if it is an unAmerican commie sport, it’s still the most popular sport in the world. (And I’m no tea-bagger myself….). My aversion to soccer is not because it’s different or unknown, it’s because it requires too much running, and as a competitive kid I had a hard time keeping up with the ball. Having confessed my sins against soccer, I now have a clear conscience to boldly root for the day envisioned by Jon Stewart, when the USA wins the world cup, and “the whole rest of the world has to then refer to the sport as soccer.”

John Oliver’s American Soccernomics:

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“That’s Not What He Said!” April 9th, 2010

Like many Americans, I get most of my news from the Daily Show. (That and a complex series of web readers, which have inevitably become too cluttered.)

And once again last night, Jon Stewart nailed it. By this I mean after very clearly laying out the facts in the Administration’s NPR (Nuclear Posture Review) he then juxtaposed the usual suspect’s (guess who) predicable noise.

He does this often and well, but this clip stands out because of mix of the gravity of the subject matter set against the Fox/Gingrich brazen disregard for the truth, mixed wth the show’s inspiring insertion of the best of American comedy in all the right places.

The subject matter was the START treaty signed this week between the United States and Russia. To paraphrase our intrepid Veep, it’s a pretty big f*cking deal. The first START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was negotiated between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and signed by Bush 41 in 1991. START II was never ratified, leaving global nuclear arms control institutions largely in limbo.

Nuclear arms control is good. And this used to be within the realm of partisanship that stopped at the water’s edge. Alas.

A recent post I read on Facebook that is indicative of the foaming-at-the-mouth crowd’s line of attack says that Obama and START have succeeded where our enemies have failed in weakening America. And as you can see from the Daily Show Clip, Gingrich and Hannity, et al, are all too eager to run with that ball, facts be damned.

What this clip does so brilliantly is cross-cut facts such as in the case of nuclear weapons and retaliation against biological weapons – “The US ‘reserves the right to make any adjustments to this policy in the case of biological weapons threats’ as well as ‘And the new policy does not apply to countries not in compliance with NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty)’” against the blatant blathering you’d expect…

But in the end, my sheer enjoyment of the truth unfolded through great comedy is severely tempered over concern for a country where it’s up to the comedians to set the record straight on Nuclear Posture policy….

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